Frank London

Frank London’s work as a trumpeter and keyboardist spans klezmer, film scoring, avant-garde jazz, contemporary classical composition, pop, rock, and additional idioms; his performances have placed him alongside figures from vocalist Mel Tormé to avant-garde composer John Zorn. Much of the resulting output engages Jewish subject matter in one form or another.

Born in New York in 1958 to a Reform Jewish household, London began playing trumpet at age four. He completed studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1980, earning a degree then titled Afro-American music. That same year he made his first appearance on record, contributing to jazz pianist Ran Blake’s album Film Noir. From the outset his projects crossed jazz, klezmer, avant-garde rock, and scores for cinema, theater, and a Czech marionette production titled The Golem.

During the 1980s and 1990s he became especially active as a film composer, supplying music for John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and Men with Guns (1987), Bruno de Almeida’s Cannes prizewinner The Debt (1993), and The Shvitz (1993). Among his collaborators in this period were rock band They Might Be Giants, rapper LL Cool J, avant-garde composer LaMonte Young, singer Gal Costa, and, once more, Tormé and Zorn. A soundtrack album for The Shvitz appeared on the Knitting Factory label, while further sessions with Zorn were issued on the Tzadik imprint’s Radical Jewish Culture series.

London’s projects in the twenty-first century have remained equally wide-ranging. He has long performed with the progressive klezmer ensemble the Klezmatics and has established his own ensembles Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars and Hasidic New Wave. He also helped form the Les Miserables Brass Band and the Klezmer Conservatory Band and has issued multiple recordings with Klezmatics vocalist Lorin Sklamberg. Selections of his music were incorporated into the television series Sex and the City. His discography extends from cantorial repertoire and Jewish mystical songs to the folk opera A Night in the Old Marketplace. In 2023 he contributed to the multi-artist collection Killdeer, bringing his total recorded appearances past two hundred. He has instructed courses in Jewish music at institutions across the United States and Canada and holds a faculty position at the State University of New York at Purchase.